Cohen: There was some kind of thing there, yes …
Q: Who hired you to do the beating?
Cohen: Nobody.
Q: Where was the assault?
Cohen: There was no assault, really. It was just an argument.
Q: Two of you hit him …
Cohen: I know I hit him. I don’t know who else hit him …
Q: The court apparently did think you both hit him. You were fined $100 and he was fined $200.
Cohen: Then I must have hit him less.
Bugsy Siegel was a great mentor, indeed, for Mickey Cohen. Bugsy had the whole class act nailed to the last, when they laid him out in a $5,000 bronze coffin lined with silk, candelabras at each end.
* * *
THE GANGSTER SQUAD had little time to build its dossier on Bugsy. He often was away in Las Vegas directing construction of his Flamingo hotel-casino, which was supposed to transform the Nevada city. Bugsy was there a lot because his dream project was way behind schedule and over budget, plagued by a misguided design that gave each room its own sewer line and created a penthouse suite with a beam down the middle so a man had to duck to avoid conking his head. When Bugsy was in California he increasingly stayed outside the squad’s jurisdiction, at the Beverly Hills mansion rented by his mistress Virginia Hill. Though generally described as a party-loving Alabama oil heiress, she was hardly a prototypical Southern Belle, having used some of her money to back a prominent Chicago bookie, earning a piece of his action. The Los Angeles Mirror columnist Florabel Muir was at a beauty salon when a package addressed to Virginia Hill was delivered with ten $1,000 bills in it. “She was a hey-nonny-nonny sort of gal,” Florabel wrote, but also “knew all the Boys.”
On the morning of June 20, 1947, Bugsy flew back from Las Vegas and stopped at his barber shop before meeting his lawyer. He also may have squeezed in a visit with Mickey, though Mickey once said it was the day before that Bugsy asked him, “’Ya got armament?” and he replied, “Whatever ya’ want.” That night, Bugsy and his friend Allen Smiley decided to try a new restaurant in Santa Monica, Jacks-at-the-Beach, and ordered the trout. On the way out Bugsy picked up the early edition of the Los Angeles Times and they returned to the Moorish mansion, where Bugsy sat at one end of the living room sofa, bright white with a floral pattern. For some reason the curtains on the window were drawn back, giving anyone outside a clear look in. The bullets came from a .30-caliber military carbine. When the columnist Florabel Muir heard the news she rushed over and discovered “perfume pervaded the room from the night-blooming jasmine clustered outside the window through which the deadly shots had been fired. The Los Angeles Times was lying across his knees and on it was stamped: ‘Good Night. Sleep peacefully with compliments of Jack’s.’ Bloody sections of his shattered brains partially blotted out the eight-column headline telling of another fatal shooting in a poorer section of Los Angeles.” Florabel got the best words, but the competing Herald-Express got the best picture, showing the body on a slab at the morgue, the big toe protruding from under a sheet with a tag hung on it, “Bugsy Siegel.”
Jack O’Mara and Willie Burns rushed to Beverly Hills police headquarters to get in on the investigation, but the profusion of law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County could frustrate anyone, even the crooks. By the late 1940s, forty-six different agencies were policing parts of the sprawling county’s 4,000 square miles. For the crooks, the problem was whom to bribe—a police official might be able to offer you protection on one side of the street but not the other. For honest cops, the problem was who to trust. The Gangster Squad would not share information with many agencies, but Beverly Hills police were considered OK so the two men offered their services to that city’s chief, hats in hand. Chief Clinton H. Anderson said, “We don’t need any help,” O’Mara recalled. “I said, ‘Well screw you. It’s your case—you take the heat.’”
And Beverly Hills cops did just that. O’Mara watched the inquest from a back row and came up with his own theory. He didn’t go for the conventional wisdom that the mob’s higher-ups had enough of Bugsy’s wasteful spending on the Flamingo, some of it their money. He didn’t believe Dragna did it, either. From the back of the inquest, O’Mara kept eyeing Virginia Hill’s brother, Chick, who lived upstairs in the mansion and might well have heard Bugsy’s famous temper play out on his sister. The brother was a veteran too, he knew how to use a carbine. But finding the truth was a mind game you couldn’t win—this was a murder they’d never solve, the living room slaughter that created a vacancy in the hierarchy of organized crime, such as it was, in Los Angeles.
“I took over from Benny right away, on instructions from the people back east,” Mickey said later. “To be honest, his getting knocked in was not a bad break for me.”
CHAPTER 7
The Fake Drive-By
Sometimes five men piled into one of their rusted ’40 Fords to head out on a Gangster Squad stakeout, several smoking cigars, and by the end of the day their suits stank so badly their wives had to hang them outside on the clothesline at night. Connie O’Mara held her husband’s coat at arm’s length with two fingers while her other hand held her nose. The cars themselves were pathetic, going on their third or fourth engines, with 200,000 miles on the odometers. They had no floor mats and had plugs in the floorboard to pour fluid in the master cylinder. If you saw a puddle ahead, you had to put a foot over the hole or you’d get sopped, the water splashing up into your face. If there were three men in back and the car hit a bump, the middle guy’s head would bonk into the roof. That’s how it was until they got a third car so they could split more sensibly into teams.
Before they got radios in the cars they assembled at a street corner they agreed upon the night before. Then Burns would say, “OK, you two will be following…” and name their target for the evening. Once they got the radios, he’d still give them directions in a way only they would understand, “OK, meet me two blocks east and one block south of last night.”
The Tommy guns were great—they could intimidate anybody—but they were a pain. The men couldn’t leave them anywhere for fear they’d be stolen, even in the trunks of their cars. If they had to go into a store or a house to question someone, they dragged the Tommy along and put it where they could watch it. The circular fifty-round drums were available but those were a nuisance, too, because they couldn’t easily hide them under their overcoats. Most of the men opted for the 20-round clips they could stash in a pocket. There was no SWAT team then, no special training, no lightweight bulletproof vests. The Tommy gun cases were beautiful, though, about three feet long and a foot wide and deep, each with a handle. You really could imagine there was a violin inside.
Within the LAPD there were rumors about what the shadowy new squad did, with most of the gossip pegging them as internal spies, headhunters, and not without reason. The chief’s office had them quietly follow a number of fellow cops under suspicion, including one pretending to be from the state Attorney General’s Office in order to shake down a juke box company up the coast, looking for bribes. But there was nothing quiet about their actions after a beat officer confided that a bookmaking barber on 6th Street had made him a brazen offer, “Why don’t you get on the take?” Chief Horrall instructed Willie Burns, “That son of a bitch, take the bastard out,” so the squad caravanned over and demolished the barber shop, ripping out the chairs, smashing the mirrors, and tearing down the display shelves. They did it in minutes, with barely a word while Jumbo held the barber in his giant arms, making him watch. Then they lathered the fellow’s head and shaved it, with his own razors, a touch they dreamed up on the spot.
Things did not go as smoothly when O’Mara was asked to tail a notorious member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Al Guasti, its captain of Vice and protector of the most blatant bookmaking operation in the L.A. area. Guarantee Finance maintained a series of front businesses as excuses to have seventy-four phones on its ledgers, one enterprise supposedly selling magazines, one making lo
ans, another a wake-up service—the place even had a few phones taken out in the name of “Stone’s Service Station.” Guarantee Finance had a collection arm too, an excuse to have 118 “agents” on the streets. When naive outsiders approached it looking for loans, they were told, sorry, we’re out of money. Guarantee Finance operated from behind blackened windows in a two-story building on East Florence Avenue, in an unincorporated area of the county, the sheriff’s turf. But the LAPD’s higher-ups had reason to be interested in this outrage beyond city borders—they got rumblings that one of their own sergeants might be helping Guarantee Finance make collections. So a plainclothes contingent went to check it out, sneaking through a skylight to get into the upstairs loft area, where a pit boss was supervising a dozen phone clerks amid racks of betting markers. The L.A. cops had no formal authority to make arrests but ripped up the betting records, spoiling a day’s work. When they were about done a sheriff ’s deputy stumbled in, thinking they were part of the regular bookmaking crew. “Has the smoke blown over yet?” he asked. Soon after, Sheriff’s Captain Guasti stormed into the LAPD’s nerve center in City Hall and hand-delivered a letter to Reed, essentially saying: “STAY AWAY. THAT’S OURS.” So Reed asked the Gangster Squad to follow this guy and O’Mara and his partner got the job.
They tailed Sheriff’s Captain Al Guasti for an hour, through a circuitous route that ended at Schwab’s, the drugstore on Sunset where starlets were said to be discovered. Guasti took a seat at the lunch counter. They did too, at a safe distance. He waved them over and said, “You know fellas, you can tail just as well from the front. You go first and I’ll follow you.”
* * *
IT WAS OBVIOUS the squad could use someone who spoke Italian, so O’Mara suggested a young LAPD officer he’d met during the war, Lindo “Jaco” Giacopuzzi, a 230-pound former all-Valley football lineman who bulked himself up carting milk cans at his immigrant family’s dairy—Jaco’s father spoke about ten words of English in his entire life. Jaco was an easygoing bruiser who had hoped to become a fireman and took the police exam first only because he wanted practice taking a civil service test. The job was a job to him, not a crusade. He was on routine uniformed duty in a patrol car in the Hollywood Division when O’Mara and Burns tracked him down to sell him on the perks of the Gangster Squad. “Oh yes, it sounded good,” Jaco recalled.
Let’s face it, every Friday night we’d have to go to the fights in the Hollywood Legion Stadium. And every Tuesday night we’d have to go to the fights at Olympic Auditorium because that’s where all these bums hung out. Then we’d have to go to the football games. All we’d have to do is just walk in—we never had to buy a ticket or anything, just go in and see who was there with who. That’s what we’d do.
Hell, yeah, he wanted in—you or your partner even got to take home the unmarked car. Jaco kept some horses in the Valley and the other guys swore they found hay in the back seat after he got to use it. “I loved the detail,” he said.
They found Jaco a partner during another ex officio job, like the one at the barber shop. Some roughnecks in West L.A. were giving their neighbors and the beat cops a hard time while hanging out on a hill. Assistant Chief Joe Reed told the squad, “Tame ’em down a little bit,” so they made like a wrecking crew again. But this time their caravan stopped first at the LAPD’s local station to get a couple of extra men before storming the hill and kicking the crap out of the troublemakers, leaving them sprawled on the ground. Willie Burns was impressed with one of the West L.A. cops who joined in the pounding, a guy nearly as large as Jumbo, their Texas shit-kicker. Jerry Greeley looked goofy with his hair parted in the middle but he’d been a Navy commander in the war—he was smart plus scary big. Screw the haircut. They invited him out for a few drinks to explain about the nights at the fights and all that.
* * *
YOU COULD KEEP such an operation secret only so long. The squad made news for the first time on November 15, 1947, with a report that an LAPD contingent had rousted six Midwesterners in a limo on Wilshire. The six—all Italian—were booked on suspicion of robbery though there was no evidence they had as yet committed any crimes in Los Angeles. Photographers were invited in to snap the six seated on a bench in the Wilshire Station, with heads bowed, before the squad escorted four to the state border, including a Cleveland fight promoter in a blue suit found to have nineteen $100 bills in his wallet, a Detroit “roofing salesman” who said he’d come west “for my health,” and a self-described trucker who admitted having served 6½ years for a murder “I never committed.” Secrecy sometimes had to go out the window because the public needed reassurance that something was being done about what a state report soon called the “Invasion of Undesirables.” The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Led by Lt. William Burns and Sgt. J. J. O’Mara, the flying detachment apprehended the six men in a New York–licensed limousine at Wilshire Boulevard and Burnside Avenue. Check of the expensive black vehicle showed its owner to be an ex-convict from New York.”
The registered owner was identified in another account as Edward “Eddie” Herbert, but that reporter heard wrong because “Eddie” wasn’t right. Neddie Herbert was the house jokester and most trusted courier of messages between the coasts for a certain ex-boxer. Neddie was Mickey’s best munitions man, as well, reputed to be able to reassemble a machine gun like a Marine, or Willie Burns. But Neddie wasn’t in the black ’47 Caddy stopped on Wilshire, only the six Midwesterners. The squad members intentionally didn’t give the first three quite enough time to pack, so news photos showed clothes slung over their arms as they were led off for the drive out of state—in this mission, images mattered in a way they didn’t teach you at the Police Academy.
The 5-cent final edition of the Daily News sent exactly the message city fathers wanted, “Three shady characters from the East left town today in a convincing heave-ho designed to rid Los Angeles of its growing gangster element.” The fourth visitor was sent packing the next day. “Los Angeles doesn’t want your kind of characters,” Assistant Chief Reed declared. Willie Burns even got a quote in after one of the hoods griped that someone had written them a parking ticket on top of everything. “Give me the ticket, boys,” Burns said. “I’ll fix it for you.”
Of course, no one knew then what would become of the two Midwesterners allowed to stay on promises of good behavior: that self-described used car salesman James Fratianno, a parolee from Ohio, would become the L.A. mob’s most feared button man, the infamous “Jimmy the Weasel”; or that James Regace, years later, would rise to head the local mob himself, under his real name Dominic Brooklier. During the roust Fratianno hid his face when the photographers neared and let police portray him as just another overmatched buffoon. “I know these other ex-cons,” they quoted him as saying. “I met them at a nightclub here.” Regace acknowledged serving nine years for robbery but emphasized that he was gainfully employed in town, having lined up a job at a new store on Santa Monica Boulevard, a clothing shop run by this fellow Mickey Cohen.
* * *
THE INITIAL ENTRY in Keeler’s notebook for “Cohen, Mickey” had him driving a “’46 Cad. Sed Blk. Shiny 3T9 364.” But by the end of 1947 Mickey was leading a caravan of three Caddies that sped about town for nights of club-hopping with his men—they made for quite a spectacle. They no longer operated out of a ratty paint shop, either, since he opened the haberdashery selling imported suits, silk ties, and smoking jackets, a more appropriate inventory for a man of his standing. Mickey took pride in having gotten his education on the streets and flaunted his dese-dems-and-dose lingo. “I hadn’t gone to no school,” was how he phrased it. But he had evolved himself, as his betters urged, into an aficionado of French lisle socks and $275 Panama hats, allowing an occasional departure from the pro forma gray fedora. It was astonishing to look back at his first booking photo after his return to Los Angeles as an adult—the 1933 shot showed him with his top shirt button undone, tie askew, and in a plain wool jacket that was wrinkled and soiled. Now “The Mick” was
the peacock in unlined pastels and a pinky ring and his boys declared that mustachioed Adolphe Menjou, the dapper actor who played rich executives in the movies, was no longer the best-dressed man in town. His crew was a mix of Jews who’d been with him for years, such as Hooky and Neddie, and Italians such as Regace, Jimmy the Weasel, and especially the Sica brothers, whom Mickey knew when “we were just kids, hustling around.” All and all there were a lot of guys to list as salesmen at a clothing store.
The haberdashery was a natural testing ground for the Gangster Squad’s newest team, Greeley and Giacopuzzi. When that duo got their Tommy gun, they showed they understood the rules of the gig—that there were none in making life unpleasant for the likes of Mickey Cohen. Assigned to stake out the new store, Greeley and Giacopuzzi figured they would leave Mickey’s boys guessing whether they were cops or fellow hoods, and why not from Chicago? Jaco’s account:
Before we went down there we took the plates off our unmarked police car and we went to the DMV there in Hollywood, where we looked in the garbage pail and found some plates from Illinois, and we put those on. Then we went up and we parked one block down from Mickey’s place. I was on the driver’s side and Greeley was on the other side. We had our hats and overcoats and just parked the car there. Well, they didn’t know who we were and they’d send one guy out and he’d walk up to check us out and every time he’d pass by us we’d pull our coats up and pull our hat down. And so then, this was about 5 or 6 o’clock, it came time for us to leave. And so when we left, I was driving towards Mickey’s place and when we got there all the men in Mickey’s establishment came out on the sidewalk to look … And as we were going by, I took the car and I swerved it in and Greeley leaned way out of the passenger window with the Tommy gun. And you should’ve seen ’em hit the deck. All of ’em went down. He had one fellow that was quite fat and he tried to go underneath a car and he couldn’t get underneath it, you know. Then I gunned the car and off we went.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 7
